Chinese ecommerce and daily deals site Wowo (also known as 55tuan) is having a bit of a bumpy ride on its way to the US market. Wowo has been planning a US IPO for some time now, and was originally scheduled to list on the NASDAQ under the tag WOWO back in February. But that date came and went without an IPO. So did a subsequent date in March. Now, the company is reportedly scheduled for an April 1 IPO. But there are signs that might not come off either.

To begin with, Wowo’s SEC filings indicate that an April IPO might violate agreements it previously made with shareholders. In its March 4th prospectus amendment filing, Wowo indicates that one of the conditions it agreed to with shareholders for this IPO was that the IPO “be completed prior to March 31, 2015.” Wowo’s subsequent March 30 amendment of the document contains that same condition: “the offering must be completed prior to March 31, 2015.”

Given that, it’s possible that Wowo will need agree on a new timeframe with its shareholders before launching its IPO. As of this writing no updated prospectus has been filed, so that seems unlikely to happen before April 1.

There are other signs that the April 1 IPO isn’t happening. Wowo’s latest SEC filing sets the listing date for “as soon as practicable” rather than specifying April 1, and on the NASDAQ official site Wowo is not listed among this week’s coming IPOs. Most of the outlets reporting the April 1 date have specified that it is a “best efforts” timeframe.

Do not be surprised if April Fool’s Day comes and goes without a Wowo NASDAQ listing.

At this point, whether or not the April 1 IPO actually goes through, it’s hard to imagine investors being too excited about the offering after so many missed launch dates. China’s tech press is already wondering whether the company’s less-than-stellar reputation is related to its IPO troubles, and there are questions about the company’s business model. Wowo says it has more than 34 million subscribers and covers 150 Chinese cities, but the daily deals model it was built on has lost popularity in China, and the company’s pivot towards traditional ecommerce is limited by the much biggerplayers already dominating that space.

Wowo has been pushing for an IPO for a long time now, and it seems unlikely the company will abandon its plans altogether. But in the face of yet another possible missed date on Wednesday, it looks like Wowo’s bumpy ride to the NASDAQ isn’t about to end just yet.

Philippine telecommunications giant Globe Telecom announced today it is injecting up to US$50 million into its incubator arm Kickstart Ventures, which will use the fresh capital to support high-potential startups.

The amount the group dubs as “Fund 2” is possibly the largest commitment to early-stage startup investing coming out of a Philippine company, Globe claims. It will target startups expanding anywhere in the world with clear regional and global prospects.

“In the Philippines, I have yet to see a startup break-through in a big way, not because of lack of talent but because the whole sector is devoid of support. Large tech incumbents operate well here, but startups struggle,” Globe president and CEO Ernest Cu says in a statement.

He adds: “Globe has been finding and working with smaller, innovative startups to boost the quality of its customer experience, with very good results. So good that they get acquired by large global companies at respectably higher valuations. Seeing this potential, we believe that Kickstart can use the VC fund to help our startup partners to scale even faster via an equity investment.”

Kickstart started in 2012 with a US$2.4 million capital or “Fund 1” and then got a US$1.1 million top-up under the same program for 2015 deals. Fund 1 eyed startups based in any country, and which needed closer, more frequent mentoring. Thus, Fund 1 portfolio companies tended to have some of their operations in the Philippines, Globe explains.

Fund 2 will also support startups in any country, but this time, the more developed ones that have validated their markets and are now looking to expand. These startups would be focused on the digital communications and telecoms industries, as well as media, data analytics, internet of things, financial services, health, education, IT security, and energy and spectral efficiency.

“We are looking for startups that have strategic capabilities of value to communications and digital companies, in which we could invest more significant sums at series A round and beyond to drive customer adoption and market momentum. These startups can be anywhere in the world and this new fund underscores our confidence that Philippine capital and the Philippine market will support innovation,” notes Kickstart president Minette Navarrete.

To date, Kickstart has made 20 investments, which have also attracted follow-on funding from other investors, including Y Combinator, 500 Startups, and IMJ Investment Partners.

Snapdeal today announced it acquired a majority stake in RupeePower, a financial products distribution platform. RupeePower will be integrated into Snapdeal’s newly launched financial services marketplace. Further terms of the deal were not disclosed.

As a result, Snapdeal customers will now be able to apply for loans through the ecommerce site. RupeePower will use its credit comparison, matching, and processing tech and its network of banks and financial institutions to find the loans best suited for those customers. In a canned statement, Snapdeal co-founder and CEO Kunal Bahl says:

Realizing the various difficulties that consumers face while deciding and purchasing financial products/services and the challenges that companies face whilst reaching out to the ‘right’ audience, we have brought RupeePower into our family, to help solve the distribution challenges of the financial services ecosystem and make it more inclusive.

Founded in 2011, RupeePower has enabled INR 15 billion (US$240 million) in loans to date (note: it didn’t hand out those loans, just helped to match lenders with borrowers). Over the next two years, Snapdeal wants to raise that number to US$1 billion.

“The share of digital origination of credit is poised to grow from today’s 7.5 percent to 40 percent over the next four years, in an INR 40 trillion (US$67 billion) retail credit market growing at 20 percent annually," says RupeePower founder and CEO Tejasvi Mohanram. "Our emphasis will be on scaling RupeePower into the top match-making platform between lenders and borrowers, providing consumers with the best targeted offers and a super-simplified loan process, while ensuring lower opex and smarter credit match for lenders."

With over 700 licensed manufacturers, Pakistan’s pharmaceutical industry is valued at about US$2 billion, placing it amongst the ten biggest markets in Asia and making it a highly lucrative industry. Unfortunately, the country also suffers from rampant counterfeiting of popular medicines, with some estimates declaring that approximately 30 percent of drugs in the supply chain are spurious and substandard copies. And dangerous. While major manufacturers continue to call for a greater degree of regulation, oversight, and dispensation of justice, government apathy has so far stymied any efforts for reform in the sector.

Alarmingly, fake medicines sometimes reach pharmacies in government-run hospitals as well. In 2012, 112 people died after ingesting substandard medicine prescribed to them by the Punjab Institute of Cardiology. Despite public uproar and an official investigation into the incident, very little was done in terms of reform and legislation to prevent such accidents from happening again. The pharmaceutical industry continues to lobby actively for an independent drug regulatory authority at the federal level to oversee the sector, but their efforts have so far fallen on deaf ears.

Urgent problem

Closely watching these developments from the cushy confines of London was Pakistani-born investment banker Furquan Kidwai. For Cambridge-educated Kidwai, the rise up the corporate ladder has been rapid. At age 24 he was promoted to a vice president position at the Royal Bank of Scotland, eventually going on to become the director and head of European emerging markets. However, he yearned to do something different, starting his own enterprise and helping his country of birth.

By the latter half of 2012, Kidwai had started taking a keen interest in the rising tide of technology businesses in Pakistan. IT-friendly policies had resulted in an explosion of broadband internet users as well as extensive usage of mobile phones, contributing to disruptions in almost every vertical. Based on these factors and the existence of a large consumer base in Pakistan, Kidwai felt it was an opportune time for him to enter the sector. “Users are now more aware than ever before,” he tells Tech in Asia. “Ready access to information means that they are not willing to accept substandard products and service.”

In April 2013, Kidwai officially launched Dawaai.pk, Pakistan’s first ecommerce venture within the health vertical. His primary motive to do so was to bring a greater degree of transparency and awareness within this crucially-important sector and help prevent unethical practices within the overall supply chain. “Unofficial estimates of Pakistan’s pharma industry go as high as US$4 billion, with the majority of outlets consisting of small, independent retailers,” he says. “The highly fragmented nature of the market means that there is significant opportunity for disruption based on expertise and knowledge.”

Initial funding for Dawaai came from Kidwai’s own capital as well as an undisclosed sum from a network of angel investors based in the US, UK, South Africa, and Qatar. However, the venture was initially slow to gain traction as Facebook prohibited marketing for online pharmacies in Pakistan and therefore it had to rely on expensive offline marketing to get its presence established. What surprised Kidwai was the speed at which daily visitors to his portal grew, convincing him of the viability of his business and the word-of-mouth impact.

Preventing abuse

The loosely-regulated nature of the pharmaceutical industry in Pakistan results in widespread abuse of prescription drugs by people who shouldn’t be receiving them, including painkillers, sleeping pills, and stimulants. To prevent this kind of abuse, Dawaai insists that customers follow a number of procedures to ensure it’s really a valid prescription. In order to obtain controlled medication, users are required to submit a scanned prescription from a certified physician before ordering. In some cases, Dawaai’s team certifies its authenticity after verification from the doctor so that there are multiple layers of scrutiny.

The online store also has to be careful about the medicines it sources from suppliers to ensure they’re authentic. Local drugs are obtained directly from the manufacturer and cross-verified with their batch number to guarantee authenticity. For imported medication, only the official distributor is allowed to supply Dawaai, all other middlemen are ignored. “We are regularly approached by various agents offering us ‘discounted’ medicine,” says Kidwai. “However, all of them are rebuffed.” Dawaai also maintains its storage facilities with care, including temperature-controlled settings, to comply with manufacturer-issued guidelines. This is in stark contrast with the majority of independent retailers who constitute the biggest chunk of the existing market.

Dawaai outreach efforts

While Dawaai has an online presence, it is actually their customer service team that drives the majority of its sales. The venture employs a number of qualified pharmacists, nutritionists, and other healthcare professionals to respond to customer queries over phone and email. In many cases, a pharmacist suggests the best medicine for a patient based on his symptoms. However, no prescriptions for controlled medicines are ever given.

Dawaai’s growth trajectory has encouraged Kidwai to scale the model and move beyond just an online pharmacy. Earlier this month he launched Well.pk, to cater to a new segment of products such as vitamins, fitness supplements, skincare, and fertility. Kidwai is also in advanced negotiations with foreign VC firms for a funding round to expand operations all over the country and the deal is expected to be closed soon.

Every8D, the Taiwan-based startup behind enterprise chat software Team+, announced today it has closed a US$4.5 million series A funding round at a US$20 million valuation. The company names Joinsoon Electronics, a domestically-listed components maker, as one of several participants in the round.

Every8D originated as an app studio that counted local governments, taxi operators, and restaurants as its clients. But after years of developing communication software tailored for specific clients, last July the company released Team+, a free-to-use chat app for iOS, Android, and desktop browsers.

Team+ works much like one would expect – after registering, users can view a number of communication streams, chat individually with teammates, share files, allocate tasks, make announcements, and perform other work-related functions. The company also lets clients and developers make use of its API to add custom integrations and features.

During its nine months in app stores, Team+ claims to have accumulated over 200,000 users spread across 2,000 business in Taiwan. On its website, it counts ecommerce portal PCHome, convenience store chain Family Mart, drug store chain Watson, and the city’s metro as its clients.

Every8D says that it will use this funding to ramp up staffing and improve its product, as well as aid international expansion. Currently Team+ is available in simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese, and English.

When it comes to mobile messaging, Taiwan is Line country – the app has 17 million users in an island of 23 million inhabitants, and its advertisements pepper Taipei’s billboards and buses. It’s also common for employees to chat with each other in Line groups. Team+ doesn’t shy away from addressing its competition – users can invite one another through Line, and one slogan that often appears in Tea+’s ad copy translates to “More suitable for work chat than Line.”

There’s a plethora of enterprise chat apps on the market these days, the most high-profile of which is Slack, which famously climbed to a US$1 billion valuation eight months after its launch. But like consumer-facing chat, enterprise chat will almost certainly not be a winner-take-all race, as different businesses choose different products based on their needs.

A new venture capital fund called Hatcher has launched, and it is targeting to raise US$100 million. It’s well on its way there. The Singapore and Dubai-based “venture builder platform” focuses on startups in the fintech and B2B space.

Hatcher CEO John Sharp tells Tech in Asia that it will invest in startups that are “post-revenue” or have “patents that can be turned into revenue at a later stage.”

He adds: “We are looking for companies that can show revenue trend lines or other forms of product validation, and we typically look for a massive Total Addressable Market.”

Hatcher is pretty specific about what it wants. It plans to put in an average of US$7.5 million per project, though it’s open to invest more or less depending on the circumstances. On its B2B orientation, Sharp tells Tech in Asia that while he’d love to play in the B2C space, he wants to focus on what the firm’s good at.

Sharp adds that Hatcher prefers a hands-on approach to portfolio management. “We literally speak with our CEOs at least once a week, and usually once a day – and sometimes, during a critical hire or sales deal, once an hour!”

They also prefer older and more experienced CEOs in their startups, as research shows the closer they are to 50, the more likely they’ll succeed. Nonetheless, one of their portfolio companies is SocialCops, a big data startup run by 23-year-olds. “They are every bit as mature as some of our older executives,” says Sharp.

Not your granddad’s venture capital firm

Hatcher is also unique in that it runs a little like an agency. It houses a project management executive, a corporate finance team, two designers, intellectual property lawyers, and mentors.

Some of its portfolio companies include invoice financing firm ApexPeak, payment processor Telr, and data backup company DropMySite.

Probably one of the most interesting elements of Hatcher though is that it runs an investment management platform. In development for two years, the cloud app is sort of like a private Kickstarter that includes accounting, shareholder management, and corporate governance features. It also has an investor database and a CRM module.

Hatcher’s system gathers product and corporate presentations, as well as business model, financials, and sales information. Company stakeholders can view the data live via mobile and desktop. All investor groups in its affiliate network, which will be activated this year, can use the platform to share data.

Hatcher’s rise dovetails with a surging interest in fintech in Southeast Asia. Startupbootcamp’s fintech accelerator will launch in May, while Maybank and 1337 Ventures have their own initiative going. Even MasterCard held its own hackathon earlier this year.

While seemingly underrepresented in the startup scene despite Singapore’s status as a banking hub, fintech could be ready to make its mark.

Update on 31 March, 11:30pm (GMT+8): An earlier version of the article stated that Hatcher was founded by John Fearon. The company clarified the following: John is not a shareholder in Hatcher or the Hatcher Fund. Hatcher, as it is currently structured, was founded in late 2014 by Harveen Narulla and John Sharp, along with several other former shareholders of Gilcrux Holdings Pte Ltd, through a combination of early-stage assets owned by those shareholders, including the Hatcher brand and technology platform, previously owned by Content and Systems Pte Ltd, and other assets formerly owned by Gilcrux Holdings Pte Ltd.

]]>https://www.techinasia.com/singapore-fund-hatch-fintech-b2b-startups/feed/0https://www.techinasia.com/singapore-fund-hatch-fintech-b2b-startups/China’s startups can now raise investment from the crowd on JD’s new equity crowdfunding sitehttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PennOlson/~3/w_stRvY_NAY/
https://www.techinasia.com/chinas-startups-raise-investment-crowd-jds-equity-crowdfunding-site/#commentsTue, 31 Mar 2015 09:50:38 +0000https://www.techinasia.com/?p=239851
JD, China’s second-biggest ecommerce company, announced today it is launching an equity crowdfunding platform. As opposed to traditional rewards-based crowdfunding, like Kickstarter or Indiegogo, backers of projects on JD Equity Crowdfunding will actually be able to buy a slice of equity in the company they’re supporting.

As of press time, nearly 20,000 investors have signed up.

The new site expands the range of offerings from JD Crowdfunding, which has become the biggest site in China for crowdfunding gadgets since rival platform Demohour pivoted to pre-sales. It falls under the JD Finance umbrella, which includes small loans for its merchants, insurance, and credit lines to its customers.

JD says it wants to give China’s entrepreneurs access to a broad range of early-stage investors as well as training and support for companies throughout the process. That means, in addition to the capital secured through crowdfunding, JD will provide training courses with seasoned investors and entrepreneurs and access to JD’s internet finance tools. And, of course, they’ll be able to sell their products on JD Mall.

"I know from personal experience how important it is for entrepreneurs to have access to knowledge and early funding," said Richard Liu, founder and CEO of JD. "As the leader in Chinese e-commerce, JD.com is ideally positioned to create a premium platform to give China’s early-stage companies access to resources and seed capital from a broad range of investors."

Each project will be led by a professional investment manager from a VC company or a company with similar experience. That person will be responsible for ensuring transparent communication between investors and the companies raising funds. Capital Today, ZhenFund, and Sequoia Capital have all already signed on.

In return for hosting the crowdfunding campaigns, JD will take a small equity stakes in each of the projects.

Here’s a quick overview of the first 11 companies on JD Equity Crowdfunding and their financing goals, which some of them have already met:

JD’s rewards-based crowdfunding platform, JD Coufenzi, has so far helped companies raise more than RMB 280 million (US$45 million), with an over 90 percent success rate. Launched in July last year, JD states it contributes one third of all the money raised through crowdfunding in China.

Alibaba and Baidu have both launched crowd-investing platforms as well, though these are more focused on movies, games, and TV shows rather than gadgets and startups.

]]>https://www.techinasia.com/chinas-startups-raise-investment-crowd-jds-equity-crowdfunding-site/feed/0https://www.techinasia.com/chinas-startups-raise-investment-crowd-jds-equity-crowdfunding-site/Xiaomi expands home and health line with new smart scales that cost just $16http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PennOlson/~3/KO8VLFp7KSM/
https://www.techinasia.com/anniversary-xiaomi-expands-home-health-line-smart-scale/#commentsTue, 31 Mar 2015 09:37:24 +0000https://www.techinasia.com/?p=239839

Today Xiaomi unveiled five products to mark its fifth anniversary. Four of the products are simply upgrades of existing items. But the company has introduced a new device as part of its ongoing health and smart home portfolio – a smart scale.

According to Xiaomi, the Mi Smart Scale makes measurements ranging from 5kg to 150kg, with a 50g precision. When paired with the Mi Fit app, which itself pairs with the Mi Band (Xiaomi’s fitness wristband), users can track their weight and BMI. The scale and Mi Fit app are compatible with both Android and iOS – so even if you don’t own a Xiaomi phone, you can still use the scale.

A Xiaomi spokeswoman tells Tech in Asia that the Mi Smart Scale is made by Huami, the same company that makes the Mi Band. That company raised a US$35 million series B round last year, after scoring an A round led by Xiaomi. The device will retail for RMB 99 (about US$15). That’s about US$100 cheaper than the Fitbit Aria.

Xiaomi is not the first Chinese company to bring a smart scale to market. Picooc, which reportedly raised a US$21 million series B round from Tencent and others, has been selling a smart scale powered by Baidu Cloud for years. When Tech in Asia profiled Picooc in October, founder Zhang Rui said the company had sold 100,000 scales in the recent eight-month period, and was working on a complimentary wristband. Xiaomi sold 1 million units of its Mi Band wristband in three months.

Other products released today include a TD-LTE compatible Redmi 2 (suitable for China Mobile users), a pink Redmi 2, a souped up 55-inch Mi TV, and a power strip.

Xiaomi occupies an advantageous position when it comes to China’s smart home industry compared to Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent, or other hardware companies. By directing consumers to its website in order to buy smartphones – the most-used electronic device for most people – it has built out valuable ecommerce real estate which it can leverage to sell related products. This is something that Baidu, Tencent and Alibaba do not have to the same degree. Meanwhile, by selling smart home products made by third-parties like Huami, it can relieve itself of R&D costs, while still collecting relevant data when users pair devices to their Xiaomi phones or Xiaomi smart home apps.

Other products in Xiaomi’s smart home portfolio include a blood pressure monitor, an air filter, a smart plug, a security camera, and a smart lightbulb. We profiled the makers of the latter device in a recent piece.

TheMobileGamer‘s KotaGames service for browser-based games played on mobile browsers is apparently shutting down, reveal developers today whose games were featured in the service. More importantly, the wording in the letter that appears to have been sent to developers, signed by TMG founder and CEO Alvin Yap, mentions that “the reason [for terminating the service agreement] is TMG will be winding-down and hence we will be terminating the KotaGames Project entirely.”

Quite what this means for the Singapore-based mobile gaming startup is unclear at the moment. Alvin Yap confirmed to Tech in Asia that KotaGames is indeed shutting down, but would not elaborate further on the status of TMG. The company is expected to put out an official statement soon.

TMG was founded by Yap in 2008, aiming to provide a platform for mobile games playable through a phone’s browser without the need for downloads or installs and with an emphasis on the social element. Through its KotaGames service and collaborations with social platforms such as Mig33 (now microblogging platform Migme) and telcos such as Indonesia’s XL Axiata it sought to attract mobile game developers and reach feature phone users in emerging markets such India and Southeast Asia.

The gaming startup managed to secure funding from such parties as Innosight Ventures and One97MobilityFund in 2010 and in 2012 Singaporean telco SingTel and Japanese telco SoftBank acquired a 41 percent stake in the company. However, in 2013 TMG met with controversy after it came to light that it had to let go 40 percent of its workforce. Alvin Yap said at the time:

TMG is a startup and we are always learning. We recently had to undergo a major reorganization to focus on key projects while reducing investment in some low-impact ones; this unfortunately meant that some staff had to be laid off. This decision was difficult but necessary for TMG to fulfill its full potential.

While the reasons for KotaGames’ shutdown are currently unclear, it is possible that the feature phone market could not support the platform’s business model. As stated in an interview with Tech in Asia in 2012, Yap hoped to monetize feature phone users in Indonesia who had no viable alternatives to gaming and content in general (such as smartphone gaming and mobile apps), but had access to feature phone services such as horoscopes via SMS, etc.

Considering smartphone penetration in Indonesia was the lowest in all of Southeast Asia in 2013 at about 14 percent, the theory at least seemed sound. However, that might not have been enough, as the world changed and hardware manufacturers such as Nokia, which Yap mentioned as a possible partner back then, got out of the game entirely.

As mobile gaming is increasingly becoming the domain of smartphones and tablets with native apps, TMG faces an uncertain future.

Yu Jia Hui has four product lines, each under a different brand: facial masks, lotion, men’s facewash and skin care, and a Garfield cartoon-branded facial mask for kids. The company’s website states it developed its own patented skin care technology.

Yu Jia Hui sells these products through its own ecommerce website, Hmeili, but also has stores on Taobao, Tmall, Jingdong, Suning, and others. The products are sold almost entirely through internet sales alone. It has primarily grown thanks to word-of-mouth marketing, with advertising only accounting for 15 percent of company expenses in 2014. Marketing makes up to 30 percent of expenses at traditional cosmetics companies.

Company CEO Daiyue Feng says he hopes he can use the resources and intellectual support from Shunwei and Lei Jun to develop his business faster and more smoothly. He plans for Yu Jia Hui to go public in 2016.

Mobile sales have been a huge asset to Yu Jia Hui. Feng says it sold RMB 300 million (US$50 million) worth of products – 50 percent of overall sales – on mobile in 2014, and projects that proportion will continue to expand.

"Internet + Skin"

Smart cosmetic devices, such as skin moisture detectors, are a potential future avenue for the company, especially with the founder of Xiaomi at its side. The "internet-plus-skin", as Feng rather disturbingly puts it, could generate new business models for Yu Jia Hui.

We’ve actually seen this type of device in the past. Mlizhi is a pronged skin-moisture detection tool that the user presses to his or her cheek to monitor skin health and transmit the info to a smartphone app. We didn’t take it very seriously when the device was crowdfunding on Demohour.

Indian travel planner TripHobo has raised series B funding of US$3 million from Mayfield and Kalaari Capital. The three-year-old portal that lets travelers share itineraries and plan their tours better had raised more than US$1 million from Kalaari last year to add more itineraries to its data pool and enhance its tech tools.

The startup currently has more than 70,000 itineraries, which travelers can customize according to their requirements. It also has curated content on almost 400 tourist hotspots across the globe. This is a big leap from June 2014 when Tech in Asia spoke to the TripHobo team last. Then, it had about 25,500 itineraries and information on 200 holiday destinations.

Co-founder of TripHobo Karthik Ramachandra took us through one of their trump cards: a self-learning algorithm called “Trip Optimizer.” It measures parameters like distance from hotel, opening and closing times of places to visit, and so on, to help create a good itinerary. This is especially useful for travelers planning a short trip.

“The ambition for TripHobo is to be the central point of the trip planning process by allowing users to plan, optimize, and eventually book customized trips by leveraging technology,” says Nikhil Khattau, managing partner with MF Advisors.

According to Sumit Jain, VC with Kalaari Capital, “customization is going to be the game changer for the travel industry in the coming years. Travelers are no longer satisfied with ‘one size fits all’ holidays and are demanding unique experiences.” Kalaari is betting on TripHobo to capitalize on this trend.

Tech in Asiafirst wrote about TripHobo in September, 2013. However, at the time, the startup went by the name JoGuru. The co-founders decided to rebrand the company as TripHobo to reflect their global ambition.

Duriana, a mobile app that lets users buy and sell with fellow consumers, announced the raising of a US$2.5 million round led by Beenos, a Japanese investment firm with an ecommerce business. Existing investors also joined the round. The startup raised US$3.5 million to date.

The funding gives the company a runway to enhance its product discovery feature and integrate payments and logistics capabilities, says Duriana CEO and co-founder Amanda Ernst. She adds that the app lists 600,000 products and presides over a few thousand transactions a week.

This fundraising round is noteworthy because it’s apparently playing second fiddle to Carousell, probably the leading peer-to-peer mobile marketplace in Southeast Asia. It launched in 2012 and, last heard, listed eight million items and saw two million transactions sice inception – eight a minute.

Duriana’s most recent round is much less than Carousell’s, which raised US$6 million from a syndicate that includes Sequoia Capital, and it’s unclear how they stack up in terms of valuation. But going by other proxy measures on Techlist, Carousell appears to be leading in terms of the number of iOS and Android app reviews.

Perhaps Beenos believes there’s enough room in Southeast Asia for Duriana to co-exist with Carousell, and if ecommerce in Southeast Asia continues its blistering growth, there might be. While both apps are competing in Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia, only Duriana is staking its future on the Philippines. Despite the seemingly smaller overall numbers, Ernst claims it is leading the Philipine and Malaysian markets.

“What we do know is that in Malaysia over the past few months Duriana has more new registered users monthly than Carousell. In Philippines it is easy to tell from the app that we are ahead by both user and listings,” she tells Tech in Asia.

It plans to differentiate from the competition by helping users “transact simply and safely.” That was why they added an escrow payment system recently.

The 24-year-old co-founder and CEO of FlipTrip has been traveling across the Philippines from a young age. She even took on roles as a backpacker, a tour guide, a tour coordinator; she also managed the logistics of a travel show. Each experience was memorable: sharing a bench on a RORO ship in Sorsogon, caving in Samar, hiking with the Mal-Os in Romblon, judging a beauty contest in Occidental Mindoro, and sleeping in a hammock with the amihan boys of Dahican beach in Davao Oriental.

Cuenca says she was fortunate enough to have gone places, especially off-beat destinations. After all, there’s so much more to the Philippines than its blindingly white beaches. But not everyone is as lucky as her.

Lack of information on destinations

A typical problem with traveling in the Philippines, she says, is finding information about isolated or remote destinations.

Even for the popular destinations, information could sometimes be outdated or wrong, reviews could be irritatingly incoherent, phone numbers always busy or unavailable. And it’s tedious to keep an eye on different offers and deals online.

FlipTrip wants to do away with all these headaches of trip planning. “FlipTrip is all about making exploring and having adventures easier by connecting travelers directly to locals in their chosen destinations. You can find your next destination and pick your tour activities, accommodation, and transportation, then book them all in one go,” Cuenca explains.

It trains locals, with little or no experience in the web, to accept and manage bookings in real-time using a simplified reservation management system. “You might not always get a five-star hotel, but we curate our local partners to ensure that the information we present can help you to find the service that fits you,” Cuenca says.

There are so far about 8,000 users on FlipTrip’s site, and over 100 partner businesses and entrepreneurs based in Manila and six provincial destinations, including Aurora, Tarlac, Bulacan, Pangasinan, Zambales, and Cagayan.

The site also provides travel concierge services for clients, especially foreigners, who are looking to go on multi-destination trips.

Tourism growth

But looking at the big picture, FlipTrip’s role isn’t just easy bookings. It is an important piece in Philippine tourism and the improvement of the lives of communities largely dependent on this industry.

From Cuenca’s perspective, the Philippine travel industry has come a long way. “You can really see that in how rapidly destinations have been becoming accessible in terms of transportation convenience. The initial infrastructure we need is there. There are roads, resorts, restaurants, guides, and so on.”

The government’s “It’s More Fun in the Philippines” campaign, she adds, succeeded in making many of the country’s destinations appealing, and viral. “They did a great job bringing awareness.”

The question now becomes: how do people find these destinations and avail of local services? “FlipTrip is here to make them experience exactly why ‘It’s More Fun in the Philippines’,” says Cuenca.

Cuenca says they work closely with local government units in areas FlipTrip operates. The startup just launched a digital tourism seminar program where it gathers different stakeholders in localities and discuss with them the state of tourism in their areas, the importance of going online, and how they can move forward together.

“In order for tourism to be truly organized and established in new destinations, local governments need to take responsibility,” she says, stressing that it’s the local governments that are providing vital infrastructure for tourism to grow.

Cuenca sees tourism and infrastructure as a chicken-and-egg case. She says you need infrastructure to enable tourism, while tourism’s trickle-down effects can help communities develop their own infrastructure. These, in turn, have an impact on local and nationwide economic growth.

“By helping smaller tourism communities to grow, we can help them to have more inclusive kind of growth, by creating more job opportunities for the locals to earn and generate more income for themselves. When you think about it, when you travel, to whom does your money go? It goes to your resort or your hostel; to your tour guide; your surf instructor; your boatman that took you to that next island; that restaurant or small eatery where you had your lunch; to that driver that took you to the next attraction. Your entire experience in a destination is made up and tied together by all these people, and you affect every single one of them by visiting their community, their home,” she explains.

Building communities

FlipTrip therefore is all about building communities.

“FlipTrip works to create tourism communities around the country, which would foster more camaraderie and collaboration among the different tourism stakeholders. It’s not enough for us to put them online, because at the end of the day, they are the destination. They make up your experience in the destination. They need to work together to make it the best destination it can be, and they need to own that,” notes Cuenca.

When she was 12, Cuenca recalls she was deeply troubled by news about how remote areas could not receive rescue and aid after a strong typhoon. Roads linking these areas to the world were difficult to pass or non-existent to begin with. “I promised to myself that one day, I would do something about that.”

The back-and-forth between SmartNews and Gunosy, Japan’s premier news apps that are taking their domestic war global, added a new chapter today. Only a week after Gunosy filed for a US$263 million IPO, SmartNews tells Tech in Asia that it has nabbed a US$10 million bridge round at a pre-money valuation of US$320 million.

The funding round features previous investors Gree, Globis Capital Partners, Atomico, Mixi, and Social Venture Partners. Since its founding in June 2012, SmartNews has publicly raised a touch over US$50 million.

That’s a lot of coin, but SmartNews has the business fundamentals to back it up. As we have covered in the past, SmartNews grabbed 1 million monthly active users (MAU) in the US to complement its 4 million MAU in Japan. It’s international app, which launched in 150 countries last month has raced out to 10 million downloads.

That growth is led by the United States, followed by India, Canada, the United Kingdom, and China. The United States is where SmartNews is focusing most intently. It has a local team in San Francisco of about ten and is expecting to add more employees. Worldwide, the team is is over 40 people, a number that is expected to double or triple this year, according to Kaisei Hamamoto, co-founder of the company.

Engineers, specifically data scientists are sure to be a focus of the firm’s hiring efforts. Its success so far is the result of having a robust, advanced algorithm for finding the right news for each user.

“Our algorithms review both local and global sources to tailor the news to that specific country’s trends and reading habits. (For example, when I traveled to London, I saw both UK-specific articles from the Guardian and BBC, and articles from CNN and NBC News because these American articles were trending in the UK that day. All too often “trending on Twitter” can be too US-centric. We take in consideration what’s actually relevant and trending in your country,” co-founder Ken Suzuki, tells Tech in Asia.

At this point, it might soon be time to retire the assumption that SmartNews and Gunosy are binary, opposing forces. Gunosy’s close relationship with telco KDDI and its IPO, are both signs that the company is a serious player with powerful backers. In Japan. SmartNews has a strong Japanese following of its own, but its recent moves prove that it is interested in playing on the world stage. It is now less a question of whether or not the startup can vanquish Gunosy, but if it can muster up a challenge strong enough to topple global leader Flipboard.

]]>https://www.techinasia.com/smartnews-320-million-valuation/feed/0https://www.techinasia.com/smartnews-320-million-valuation/1-hour delivery startup from China crowdsources local convenience stores, snags $20M fundinghttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PennOlson/~3/6-j2B-T2lTQ/
https://www.techinasia.com/beequick-delivery-series-b-funding/#commentsTue, 31 Mar 2015 04:39:13 +0000https://www.techinasia.com/?p=239788Beequick, a food and drink delivery startup, has announced it secured a US$20 million series B round of funding led by Hillhouse Capital with participation from Sequoia Capital, according to iYiou. Beequick says it’s now valued at US$200 million.

Founded in May last year, Beequick got its start in Beijing by promising one-hour delivery of snacks, beverages, liquor, coffee, and fruit. It has since expanded to Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and a few other cities. In October last year, the company completed a US$20 million series A round led by Sequoia.

Beequick takes advantage of a large network of local convenience stores to find the nearest vendor with the requested items. The startup says it has more than 10,000 convenience stores on board, who deliver over 30,000 orders daily. Payments are made in the app.

Note that the startup offers deliveries in China’s four biggest cities, but neither my address in Shenzhen nor my previous address in Beijing seemed to be within the delivery area. Both are fairly centrally located.

While name-brand convenience stores like 7-Eleven and Q-Mart are common in China, even more frequent are privately-owned shops with generic names like "cigarette and liquor store" or "fruit and vegetable stand." These primarily make up Beequick’s network.

According to Daum Kakao, the app will work much like Uber and other ride-hailing apps. After registering through their Kakao accounts, users input their drop-off location, and a ride request is sent out to the nearest taxis logged on to the app. Users can also send notifications to their friends reporting their whereabouts, and can rate drivers based on their performance.

Daum Kakao says that the company has signed memorandums of understanding with the Korean National Joint Conference of Taxi Association, the Seoul Taxi Association, the Federation of Korean Taxi Workers’ Union and the Korean Taxi Workers’ Union to help support the service, and adds that they are “working closely with major operators” to bring the app to life. We’ve asked Daum Kakao which specific taxi providers it is working with to get the app out to drivers

Update: Kakao says that drivers sign up individually and it hasn’t formed partnerships with specific operators. They add that KakaoTaxi does not impose fees on drivers or passengers at present, but the company might consider monetization options as its user base grows.

Messaging apps make a jumping off point for ride-hailing and other services because they give drivers a built-in network of potential passengers. In January, Japan’s Line partnered with Nihon Kotsu, the nation’s largest taxi provider, to release a taxi-hailing function for Tokyoites. Early in 2014, China’s WeChat partnered with Didi Dache to bring the same feature inside its messaging app.

Seoul has emerged as a city taking a tougher stance on peer-to-peer ridesharing. Earlier this month, Uber suspended its UberX service in the city after local authorities indicted CEO Travis Kalanick. Kakao’s taxi-centric service, however, is less likely to draw the ire of transport bureaus.

Alibaba cloud subsidiary Aliyun announced Monday that more help is on the way for Chinese startups thanks to its new “Founder+” program. The program was created by Aliyun together with 30 venture capital firms including Zhenfund, IDG, and Innovation Works, as well as 20 research institutes and incubators and 20 marketing, distribution, and development firms. The collective effort will offer founders funding, office space (including office management resources and hardware), links with and guidance from investors, tax breaks, development units, and soft distribution and marketing services.

Free office space will reportedly be available in Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Shenzhen, and Wuhan for accepted startups. Aliyun will also give each founder between RMB 30,000 and RMB 400,000 (US$4,800-$64,000) in cloud-based resources, as well as free cloud training. Anyone working on an innovative startup will be eligible to apply for the program.

Aliyun operations manager Wang Ming told reporters that cloud computing is changing the way startups are founded, so with “Founder+” Aliyun wants to make founding a startup more convenient. He also said that the company hopes to add more partners to the program so that it can offer services even more of China’s startup hotspots.

In Nepal, over 60 percent of its population may never know what electricity is, let alone enjoy its many uses in their lives. And in such less-privileged countries, girls and women often have it worst. Similar to Taliban-ruled Afghanistan not long ago, the Nepalese female population are not only denied education, but are routinely sold into prostitution under the delusion of a “better life,” according to Anya Cherneff.

Cherneff is familiar with these patterns of discrimination. She has spent the better part of her life in the non-profit sector finding ways to empower women to break out from systems of oppression – such as human trafficking – and make an impact on their respective communities. Meanwhile, her husband Bennett Cohen was thinking about how to enable the widespread adoption of clean energy – which is both cheap and environmentally-friendly – in developing countries.

The duo found the answer one day in the form of an organization called Empower Generation, which supports female entrepreneurs by providing them the means to sell cheap solar lamps that are environmentally friendly. Nepal was chosen as its base not only because of the sheer poverty and rampant discrimination present there, but also because families were using inefficient and potentially deadly means to get energy for day-to-day tasks.

“Traditional household energy practices, such as burning firewood and kerosene, affect health and consequently educational and economic development. It also threatens Nepal’s rich biodiversity,” explains Cherneff. She estimates that Empower Generation’s network of clean energy products have helped to displace close to 1,500 tons – approximately 1.4 million kilograms – of carbon dioxide in Nepal to date.

The business of clean energy

What Empower Generation does is to provide women entrepreneurs with the funds and mentoring necessary to set up their own clean energy businesses. The cash and equipment are supplied by clean energy product suppliers and impact investors, who provide capital for its Clean Energy Fund and Women’s Entrepreneur Fund.

The former fund gives microloans to the Nepalese underprivileged so that they can purchase the entrepreneurs’ innovations. These low-interest loans are administered by local savings and credit cooperatives “with a reliable microfinance track record.”

Hence, by equipping women with the means to start these businesses and the poor with sufficient cash to buy their wares, Empower Generation effectively creates markets for clean energy products in Nepal. Loan repayments are then channeled back into starting a new enterprise, or providing credit to a new community.

So far, over 50 women and girls have been given small business training. “We’ve given sales and marketing training to 100 people, delivered clean energy awareness programs to over 1000 people, and financed over 500 microloans for the poorest of the poor to purchase our solar lights,” Cherneff adds.

According to her, their ultimate goal is to create “a generation of smart clean energy consumers who are poised to leapfrog the antiquated centralized grid for distributed clean power they control.”

A virtuous cycle

The question is, why would investors and suppliers choose to invest their resources in such uncertain territory?

“We offer donors a high impact, perpetual philanthropic investment – a gift that is leveraged again and again to support new entrepreneurs and scale our existing businesses in Nepal,” explains Cherneff. On top of that, impact investors will receive a financial return, while suppliers get access to hard-to-reach key markets like Nepal.

One of its key suppliers, for example, is a global solar energy company called d.light, with whom they have a non-exclusive partnership for the supply of solar lamps.

Empower Generation also receives its income from a mix of private and public foundational grants, individual and corporate donations, and any return-on-investments made in its network of clean energy businesses.

Empower Generation’s crew of female entrepreneurs are doing impressive work across Nepal. Take Pabrita Aryal and her business, Tri Urjah, for example. “[She is] one of our regular top performers,” Cherneff says. “Aryal has sold over 1,300 solar lights in the Bardiya region of Nepal – a region that does not have access to reliable energy – since starting her business in 2013.”

Runa Jha and her first lamp

The recipients of clean energy products are also seeing healthy returns from this new market. Runa Jha, a 38-year-old widow, managed to build up her handicraft business with the simple purchase of just one lamp from Sita Adhikari, Empower Generation’s chief entrepreneur.

Studying without a good source of light is no mean feat.

“She used the light to earn more income making handicrafts during the night […] and safely lit her home and created more hours for her three children to study,” explains Cherneff. Adhikari then returned to the village a few months later to deliver a training program, which Jha attended. She submitted a business proposal, and became Empower Generation’s latest entrepreneur.

“Additionally, this year we’re really excited as we’ve just received more than 50 applications from women across southern Nepal to join our network of entrepreneurs in 2015,” Cherneff adds.

In an interesting reversal of roles, many of these women entrepreneurs have husbands who work as full-time sales agents for their ventures. “We have entrepreneurs as young as 21 who have now become respected community members, and are regularly invited to participate in local governance,” she says.

Going big

In 2013, Empower Generation’s efforts in supporting female entrepreneurs became globally recognized as a finalist in Project Inspire, an initiative run by the Singapore Committee for UN Women.

Now, Cherneff and her husband are ready to take it to scale. So far, they’ve sold over 12,000 solar lights, equipping some 46,000 Nepalese with cleaner and safer homes since the organization was founded in 2011.

“We’ve been spending the past four years planning and developing our model, having built up the only grassroots, women-led energy distribution network in Nepal,” she says. “Now, we’re ready to offer our customers more than just solar lights – think powered homes with fans and TVs – and to expand our distribution network by doubling our sales network in 2015 to over 100 entrepreneurs and sales agents.”

Empower Generation also partners with other non-profit organizations to support their work in Nepal. Cherneff explains:

Three of our entrepreneurs in the Kailali district of Western Nepal currently partner with Mercy Corps Nepal and FAYA (Forum for Awareness and Youth Activity) as part of the STEM project, a GBP 1.7 million (US$2.5 million) programme working to ‘Support the Education of Marginalised Girls in Kailali District’. Project work includes making solar light accessible to improve girls’ study time and improve their learning outcomes, as well as training girls in business skills towards the goal of improving their life chances.

Chinese online education platform Genshuixue announced Monday that it has raised a US$50 million series A round. The round was led by Hillhouse Capital, and reportedly values the startup at US$250 million.

Genshuixue is a website and mobile app that allows users to search for courses, both local and online, in a variety of subjects from piano to SAT prep. Once they’ve picked a type of course, users can browse all of the teachers of that subject in their area. The site includes user comments and verifies details like teachers’ professional qualifications so users can be sure of what they’re getting. Once they’re done browsing their options, users can register and pay for their classes online.

The site has been online for just under half a year, but in that time Genshuixue has signed up more than 70,000 teachers who offer more than 69,000 different classes to “millions” of students. According to founder Chen Xiangdong, thanks to Genshuixue the site’s most popular teacher is now generating millions in income.

The online education sector continues to burn white-hot in China. In just the past few weeks, several test-prep startups have raked in investments and an O2O education platform was acquired by Dianping. Direct competitors to Genshuixue like Qingtajiao have also raised funds in recent months.

]]>https://www.techinasia.com/chinese-education-platform-genshuixue-raises-us50m-series/feed/0https://www.techinasia.com/chinese-education-platform-genshuixue-raises-us50m-series/How Western ed-tech startup Monkimun raised $1M, and how it plans to take on Asiahttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PennOlson/~3/GOGAORhL1Co/
https://www.techinasia.com/western-education-startup-monkimun-raises-1m-southeast-asia/#commentsTue, 31 Mar 2015 01:00:17 +0000https://www.techinasia.com/?p=239731

Last week, US- and Spain-based mobile startup Monkimun told Tech in Asia that it had raised a US$1M funding round to bolster its language-learning apps. And although you might expect an American startup (and US-based 500 Startups participant) to be raising its funds principally from Silicon Valley, this round includes some interesting Asian investors: Singapore’s Incuvest and Japan’s SHOzemi Innovation Ventures. Why the interest from Asia? Therein lies a tale.

Origins of Monkimun

Monkimun co-founder Cristobal Viedma has been interested in education – and Asia – for a long time. Though originally from Spain, a few years ago Viedma found himself working in Singapore for video startup Viki. Though Viki wasn’t focused on education, Viedma saw how the platform could be educational for many users, who were using it to translate and subtitle videos. “I thought that was a great thing,” he said, “because it bridges communities, it bridges cultures.” Having studied five languages himself, it was easy for Viedma to see the value in using online tools like Viki to bolster language-learning efforts.

After Viki – the company was acquired by Japan’s Rakuten in 2013 – Viedma returned to Madrid, where his sister was working on setting up educational language-learning centers across Madrid. Viedma helped her set up one such center, and it was a success. “How do we scale this?” Viedma wondered. After his experience at Viki, one answer suggested itself: smartphones.

Monkimun’s founders

So in January of 2014, Viedma and his sister/co-founder started work on a small prototype app. The goal: to make language learning fun and immersive for young children. At first it wasn’t that serious – “just a side project,” Videma said – but after a few months and a few apps, it started to take off. Viedma decided it was time to get serious, so he hopped on a plane to Singapore and started talking to investors there. Quickly he got an offer for a seed round and began planning to base the company in Singapore. But then Viedma spoke to 500 Startups head (and Viki investor) Dave McClure, who recommended basing the startup in Silicon Valley to facilitate future fundraising, even though the company’s biggest market was likely to be in Asia. Viedma agreed, and along with his co-founder he traveled to the US to participate in 500 Startups’s summer batch.

Choosing a target

It was in the US that Monkimun finally fixated on a clear target: to create an adaptive mobile language-learning platform that gives kids a fun and immersive learning experience while also tracking their performance and adapting lesson difficulty on the fly. With that goal set, the company started fundraising for real. Monkimun looked in particular to educational institutions, and found Japan’s SHOzemi Innovation Ventures. The venture offshoot of Japan’s largest after-school education chain, SHOzemi Innovation Ventures was looking for ed-tech startups in the region to invest in. Monkimun, though it was legally based in the US, seemed like a good fit.

Viedma’s connections in Asia are part of the reason that Monkimun has been able to attract Asian investors, but another is that the company’s products have been very well-received here. Its adaptive learning platform isn’t finished yet, but the company currently has five apps for learning English, Spanish, and Chinese, and Viedma says the demand in Asia has been impressive. The company has even localized its apps in a number of Asian languages to make life easier for Asia’s young language learners. For example, Viedma says, its Chinese class app has been localized in Bahasa Indonesia and Thai, because the company knows learners in those markets are interested in Chinese.

Monkimun’s apps, up on the wall.

Gearing up for the future

The real test for Monkimun will come in June, though, when the company releases its subscription-based adaptive learning platform. Monkimun will keep making standalone apps, too, but Viedma made it clear that the platform is the company’s primary objective. And although selling apps and subscriptions can be tough in Asia’s freemium-focused market, Viedma is confident that Monkimun can break through. Asian parents are demonstrably willing to spend quite a bit on their kids’ education, he pointed out. And the subscription-based model ensures that parents don’t have to worry about their kids seeing inappropriate ads or accidentally spending thousands in in-app purchases.

Of course, there’s also no shortage of competitors for Monkimun in the language-learning app space, but Viedma thinks his company can beat the competition with better depth and higher quality. The depth comes with the amount of content – rather than creating one-off apps that only teach a few words and phrases, Monkimun is working towards a platform that has dozens of lessons in a variety of fun games and activities for kids to work through. The quality comes from testing; Viedma says that Monkimun tests with children every Friday. This is “super important,” he says, because it can be hard to anticipate how young children will respond to a game. “It’s tough to do,” Viedma says of testing, “but I’m very happy we’re doing it because it’s one of the things that differentiates us with other companies. If you don’t test with children, it doesn’t work.”

With US$1 million in the war chest and a few months before the release of the adaptive learning platform, Viedma and Monkimun are excited about the future. There’s plenty of competition out there already, but early signs suggest that Monkimun’s focus on depth and quality is already paying off: the company’s apps have won a number of awards already.

Navigating the startup seas as a new investor or entrepreneur can be tricky business; it’s all about how you approach unruly waves and, depending on your skills and expertise, it can be smooth sailing or a really bumpy ride.

That’s why Silicon Valley venture capital seed fund and startup accelerator 500 Startups is working with the Stanford Center for Professional Development on a two-week course on early-stage tech investing. Aimed at investors present and future looking to dip their toe into startup investments and to get a better idea of how to raise money in optimal ways, the course will take place at Stanford campus and 500 Startups offices in California from May 4 to 15.

The program, called “The Insider’s Guide to Silicon Valley Investing”, will be taught both by Stanford faculty members and experienced investors and entrepreneurs, including Mike Lyons, Michael Lepech, and Pedram Mokrian, as well as by 500 Startups managing partners Dave McClure and Bedy Yang.

Some of the insights the program organizers hope to impart on attendees include looking into Silicon Valley stakeholders and how financing in tech investing works, opportunity assessment, and how to build the necessary portfolio and conduct due diligence while preparing an investment pitch. Also on the menu will be case study reviews from entrepreneurs raising capital, as well as networking opportunities with startups. In addition, attendees will have the chance to meet and interact with Silicon Valley power players such as founders and angels as well as advisors, lawyers, etc. Between networking, visiting key Silicon Valley locations, and attending courses, the program promises to be a full-time affair for everyone involved.

While prospective attendees away from California and closer to Asia might find the trip daunting (not to mention the price tag), 500 Startups remains hopeful that many attendants will, in fact, be from this side of the Pacific ocean, and come from an entrepreneur’s background.

“The [program’s] target audience is investors and investors-to-be,” 500 Startups managing partner Bedy Yang told Tech in Asia. “In the Bay Area, it is quite common to have founders who exit to become active angels and mentors, so we’d like to see that [happen] in other markets too.”

Those interested in applying for the course can find out more at 500 Startups’ website. Application deadline is April 10. Tuition fees are US$18,000, which covers the entire two-week program, but not travel and accommodation.

Five startups have just completed a four-month incubation program at US-based retailer Target’s accelerator in Bangalore. This is the second batch to graduate from the accelerator, which focuses on new ideas in retail. This batch of startups had innovators in omnichannel, data, digital marketing, mobile, and supply chain.

Wazzat is a visual search engine. Its widget has both mobile and web APIs which ecommerce sites can easily integrate. The widget helps find visually similar products. During the incubation, it tested its “find similar” tool with apparel and shoes on the Target site.

Whodat makes mobile augmented reality apps for brands to help customers visualize their products. For example, it piloted an app at the accelerator for people to see how Target’s dinnerware would look in their homes.

Visarity enables interactive 3D experiences on both mobile and web, for apps as well as ads. It has wide applications in product demos, navigation maps, and gaming. Target used the Visarity platform to build a game experience for its media network.

Torch is a wireless sensor built by Antarix Labs to monitor smartphone activity inside a store. In this way, it aims to provide offline retailers with the kind of analytics on customers that online retailers now take for granted.

Synapse

This is another offline play. The Synapse app recognizes customers when they walk into a store and sends context-aware notifications to the lockscreens of their mobile phones. At Target, it piloted relevant push offers for customers on Android lockscreens.

Now, with the second batch having graduated, Target has called for applications for a third batch starting in June.

A few years after graduating from university, Talha Izhar found himself in an uncomfortable and unforeseen situation. Over the course of the past few years his friends had slowly trickled out of Pakistan; some had left for higher education, others had been offered jobs, while the rest had simply joined their families in pastures new. Izhar, who worked as a software consultant at the time, wished to make more social networks but did not have the time or opportunities to do so. Unaware of events and meet-ups happening in his home city of Karachi, he was not in a position to make new friends or acquaintances.

For Izhar, this barrier to information turned out to be far more intriguing than he initially envisioned. While not exactly teeming with cultural activities, Karachi is still an urban metropolis of approximately 20 million people and a significant middle class segment. There is significant interest in the food and entertainment industry but a lack of awareness sometimes prevents event organisers from reaching as many people as they would like, with Facebook being the primary social network used to promote events.

Inspired by social networking site Meetup, Izhar quit his job to start work on a new app which he hoped would help facilitate offline group meetings. The venture, titled Jus’ Plan It, aims to carve out a niche in event planning and community meets by giving an overall listing of activities happening nearby. “Unless you are invited to an event on Facebook, it is difficult to find out exactly what is happening nearby,” Izhar tells Tech in Asia. “We want to give individuals and businesses the opportunity to attract a wider audience.”

Jus’ Plan It team

Group chats

How the app works is fairly simple. Initially you have the option of either creating an event or browsing through existing ones in your geographical location. If you choose to create an event, you can set it as as invite-only, or public, where anyone with the app can view it. The events can also be filtered according to their category, such as meals, film screenings, outdoor activities, travel plans, shopping trips, and parties. For public events, the app allows organisers to advertise their meets to all users within a maximum radius of a hundred miles and also gives the number of available users in the specified range.

Izhar is quick to explain that his venture is not simply a clone of Meetup. “They [Meetup] are focused on interest-based communities while we help our users plan and create events more effectively with friends and family,” he says.

The most intriguing feature of Jus’ Plan It is the option for a group chat among all an event invitees. Akin to a WhatsApp group chat, the feature allows users to converse freely and send images to one another but does not give away personal details such as their phone numbers. For Izhar, this will be crucial in evoking trust and camaraderie, as well as allowing organizers to relay crucial information in the case of any unforeseen circumstances.

There is certainly a rising interest in the local community for greater information and transparency about events and networking opportunities happening nearby. Websites such as Happening.pk and KiaSceneHai.pk both aim to bridge this gap by giving a comprehensive listing of events, talks, and festivals in the major cities of Pakistan. However, Jus’ Plan It takes this a notch higher with a fairly well-designed user interface and greater freedom to add events in the database.

While there are certainly plans to monetize, for now Izhar is concentrating on providing a hassle-free experience. Once there is significant traction, users may find sponsored events as well as discount offers when planning meets such as meals, shopping, or travel excursions. The aim, however, will always be to strengthen ties and bring local communities closer together, he explains.

]]>https://www.techinasia.com/pakistan-startup-create-social-networks-local-events/feed/0https://www.techinasia.com/pakistan-startup-create-social-networks-local-events/In Indonesia, new businesses emerge out of the wave of makeshift social media ecommercehttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PennOlson/~3/kNi4VanyLwA/
https://www.techinasia.com/social-media-shopping-services-in-indonesia/#commentsMon, 30 Mar 2015 13:08:13 +0000https://www.techinasia.com/?p=239598Yep, Indonesia is a social country. It is the world’s 4th largest market for Facebook, and 5th for Twitter according to advisory firm Redwing.

But Indonesian users aren’t on social networks only to stay connected with family, friends, and colleagues. They use the same channels to sell goods. According to a 2014 report by Singaporean logistics firm SingPost, nearly 27 percent of all ecommerce sales happen through social media.

And really, why not? There’s no simpler way to sell a product than to post a photo on your existing channels and name the price. For small-scale sellers with an immediate connection to their customers this model might be just right. Especially Instagram has proven to be attractive for this type of entrepreneurship, not only in Indonesia.

There are disadvantages though: for sellers, it’s hard to reach new audiences outside of their existing circle of friends. For buyers, the issue is trust. They need to have some guarantee that the offer is legit. And for buyers, it’s also not easy to discover new sellers they’ve never heard of.

Interestingly, a number of businesses have emerged that seek opportunity by providing services on top of the social media selling phenomenon. Unlike marketplaces which invite users to register, open, and update virtual shops on their site, these companies aggregate content from existing social media channels.

Here are four local Indonesian players in this emerging segment, each with a unique angle.

Shopius has been around since May 2013. The site started out as a C2C marketplace, but then shifted its focus. It began aggregating the information from fashion stores on Instagram. Instagram users register with Shopious and pay a fee to have their content integrated with the site. But any new photo they upload to Instagram will from now on automatically be posted to Shopious, and the seller no longer has to go through the trouble of keeping a shop website up to date. As aggregator, Shopify does not facilitate any transactions on its website. Buyers get in touch with the shop owners directly to close the deal. Shopius is strictly limited to fashion items.

Kleora targets sellers who already run informal shops on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. Similar to Shopious, this site, which was launched in 2014, requires sellers sign up to have their accounts integrated with Kleora. Their updates will now automatically show up on the site. As a marketplace, Kleora also facilitates the transactions on its platform. Kleora takes a commission from every sell, and allows all kinds of products.

Oiffel is very similar to Shopious, in that it aggregates images from Instagram sellers who have signed up with their platform. Oiffel just started in 2015 and is open to all kinds of products, not just fashion. It’s free for users to sign up, but Oiffel plans to introduce premium features for sellers who want their items to be showcased on the front page. Oiffel also plans a mobile app to make it easier for sellers to sign up.

Zocko’s model is different. The site holds a selection of items which Zocko has aggregated from various boutiques. On Zocko, individuals choose an item, but instead of buying it, they help to promote it. To endorse a product, users spread a link through their social media accounts. If someone buys the product using that link, the user get a commission. And Zocko, in turn, also gets a cut from that commission. This company has been around since 2013.

Future shopping

Online stores like Lazada and C2C marketplaces like Tokopedia may hold advantages for some, especially those who buy and sell at larger scale.

But as tastes, shopping behaviours and modes of production become increasingly molecular, it’s possible to imagine a future in which the most immediate form of selling, from one individual to the other, gains more relevance.

Perhaps sensing a missed opportunity, Twitter and Facebook have both been exploring how to turn what people are already doing on their channels – buying and selling – into a feature. And it came as no surprise that Twitter’s CEO Dick Costolo during his recent visit to Jakarta confirmed that Twitter’s “buy botton”, once introduced, will also be available to users in Indonesia. Both Facebook and Twitter might soon need to be reclassified as ecommerce giants.

]]>https://www.techinasia.com/social-media-shopping-services-in-indonesia/feed/0https://www.techinasia.com/social-media-shopping-services-in-indonesia/Crowdfunded in China: segways, gaming PCs, and smart bikeshttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PennOlson/~3/EXsDP5FH1ww/
https://www.techinasia.com/crowdfunded-in-china-march-2015/#commentsMon, 30 Mar 2015 09:56:34 +0000https://www.techinasia.com/?p=239580This month’s list of our top five favorite crowdfunding campaigns in China all come courtesy of JD Coufenzi, and range from the practical to the overly-extravagant. Here’s our picks for March:

iFunk Shadowblade – $500 gaming laptop

Gaming laptops tend to be big, heavy, expensive machines with short lifespans, but iFunk wants to change all of that with its sleek and powerful 13-inch ultrabook. Starting at just US$500, the Shadowblade sports an Intel i7-4510U processor, 8GB RAM, a 128GB solid-state hard drive, and 1080p resolution. It weighs 1.3 kg and claims six hours of battery life. It says it can play high-end PC games like Final Fantasy 13, the latest Assassin’s Creed, and Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. It can also run intensive software like Adobe After Effects and Premiere Pro.

Best of all, the laptop is just two centimeters thick. Worst of all, it still has integrated graphics rather than a separate dedicated graphics card. That’s a lot of promises for a relatively unheard-of brand, but if iFunk can pull it off, it could be the Xiaomi of laptops.

The Shadowblade has raised RMB 1.66 million (US$267,000) with 11 days remaining on JD Coufenzi.

Smart bike JW650 and ASO Summoner – Smart bike hardware

These two products share a lot of similarities, so we’re grouping them together. The JW650 is a geared bicycle fitted with sensors and a heads-up display built into the stem (the part that holds your handlebars). The sensors zap real-time info to the display – speed, distance, calories, etc – which in turn zaps the info to your phone so you can monitor progress. The bike costs just under RMB 10,000 (US$1,600), and the project has raised RMB 4.66 million (US$750,000) so far with just over three weeks remaining.

For those who want better data on their rides but don’t want to buy a whole new bike, there’s the ASO Summoner. The gadget looks just like a plain handlebar stem, with the exception of the QR code plastered onto the top. Scan that QR code to link the internal gadgetry of the Summoner to a smartphone app as it collects and analyzes ride data. The ASO Summoner costs RMB 349 (US$56) and has raised RMB 62,000 (US$10,000) with just under a month remaining.

Automatic car cover – retractable raincoat for your car

This simple but practical tool takes the hassle out of folding up and storing a car’s rain fly. The cylinder-shaped device hangs next to the rear bumper, held in place by hooks placed inside the car’s trunk. The user can pull out the retractable cover and place it as usual onto the car. To remove it, just hit a button to winch it all back into the cylinder, then place the cylinder in the boot. The automatic car cover costs RMB 449 (US$72) and has raised RMB 43,000 (US$6,900) on JD Coufenzi with one month remaining.

MICLE – ridiculous but awesome desktop PC

It took me awhile to figure out what the MICLE was, but it certainly caught my eye anyway. It’s a high-powered desktop PC in a case designed to look like part of a Harley Davidson motorcycle complete with V-twin engine, gas tank, and audacious exhaust pipes. Practical? Probably not, but it certainly wins points for an outrageous style. The paintjob and other details, like a Transformers-esque facemask on the front, can be customized to the customer’s liking. The entire thing is a whopping 90 centimeters tall, but you can opt in for the rolling carrying case if you plan to show it off at your local LAN party. The MICLE doesn’t come cheap; the base model starts out at RMB 16,800 (US$2,700) with the top-of-the-line models going for RMB 56,800 (US$9,150). The campaign on JD Coufenzi has raised RMB 1.87 (US$301,000) million with four weeks remaining.

CSM A7 – Suitcase segway

One-wheeled segways are a growing trend in China and much of Asia. This new model from CXM is a bit more portable for the places you can’t (or shouldn’t) ride them. It comes with a telescopic handle like what you would find on a rolling suitcase, so you don’t have to actually pick it up and carry it around when not in use. For beginners, there’s also training wheels available. A built-in speaker means you can blast tunes as you roll down the sidewalk. And there’s an app so you can keep track of where you’ve been and how much battery remains. The CSM A7 costs RMB 1,900 (US$306) and has raised RMB 50,000 (US$8,050) on JD Coufenzi with just four days remaining.

Gogoro, the smart scooter company that ended its three-year stealth period at this year’s CES, announced today it will make its scooters available to the public in Taiwan this summer. The rollout will mark its first worldwide.

At a press event today in Taipei, the company said that it will also build battery charging stations in Taipei and New Taipei city, along with retail stores, parking spaces, and subsidy plans. No prices or specific release dates were disclosed.

Little was known about Gogoro before CES this year, other than that it had had close ties to Taiwanese smartphone maker HTC and US$150 million in funding. In addition to employing a handful of HTC alumni, including Horace Luke (now the startup’s CEO) and Matt Taylor (CTO), the company was backed by investors including newly-crowned HTC CEO Cher Wang.

In Las Vegas earlier this year, the company finally showed its product to the public – an electric-powered scooter that has two removable batteries, which can be interchanged at battery-swap stations throughout a city. Users can also control and track parts of the scooter through their smartphone, and the company will collect users’ travel and vehicle data in the cloud.

Beyond the HTC connection, there are other factors that make Gogoro relevant to Taipei. Like many other Asian metropolises, gas-powered scooters are ubiquitous across Taiwan. In addition, the massive success of Taipei’s UBike bike-sharing scheme makes it easy to feel optimistic towards a like-minded (though certainly more costly) infrastructure rollout. Of course, urban bike-sharing doesn’t require one to actually purchase a bike; Gogoro, meanwhile, will have to convince consumers that shelling out for a souped-up, all-electric smart scooter is worth the savings in gas.

]]>https://www.techinasia.com/smart-scooter-company-gogoro-ride-taiwan-summer/feed/0https://www.techinasia.com/smart-scooter-company-gogoro-ride-taiwan-summer/The informal guesthouse market is huge in Indonesia, and this startup claims the most complete selectionhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PennOlson/~3/5MzKPcTkM5w/
https://www.techinasia.com/informal-guesthouse-market-huge-indonesia-startup-claims-complete-selection/#commentsMon, 30 Mar 2015 08:22:37 +0000https://www.techinasia.com/?p=239543Indonesia, it is not uncommon for young people to live in their parents’ homes until they are married and move out to start a family. But many do have to leave home early – to study or for work for example – and for these folks, Indonesia invented the word “kost” to refer to guestrooms or boarding houses.

A kost is essentially an affordable room for long term tenants with basic amenities and a shared kitchen. Indonesia’s Infokost.id wants to offer the most complete listing for people in search of temporary housing accomodation. Founded in 2010, this website makes it possible to find kosts on a neighborhood level, and get in touch with the kost owners directly.

Frandy Sugianto, founder of Infokost.id, estimates there are 40,000 to 50,000 kosts in Indonesia, the majority of them in large cities. A typical kost may have between 20 to 25 rooms, according to his estimate.

If you consider each room for rent at around US$100 per month, that’s a pretty sizeable market. However, little official data seems to exists about the informal kost sector, and even long-term players like Sugianto rely on rough estimates.

Partnership with community site Kaskus

Infokost.id received seed funding when it joined the Merah Putih incubator shortly after its inception in 2010. Sugianto didn’t disclose the amount invested. Since then, there have been no further investments, although Infokost.id has managed to stick around.

In 2014, Infokost.id struck a partnership with fellow Merah Putih incubator startup Kaskus. The popular community website now features a channel with Infokost.id’s listings, helping to direct traffic to the site.

Profitable model

Infokost’s revenue comes from a listing fee to kost-owners seeking extra exposure. This comes in the form of banner advertising and a marketing fee for clients interested in engaging with the kost community. With a team of 16 people currently working on the site, Sugianto says infokost.id is turning a profit, but did not share further details.

According to Sugianto, the site has more than 25,000 listings in Indonesia’s major cities, making it the most complete kost database in Indonesia. Other sites tend to offer kosts based on single cities or neighborhoods only, according to Sugianto.

Interestingly, there is an unrelated site with a similar name. Infokost.com also offers kosts in Indonesia. This site is a direct competitor with Infokost.id. Pesankost is another player, and this site has the added benefit of offering an online booking tool for all its listings.

Infokost.id has already expanded beyond its original focus on kosts to also include other types of accommodation, like apartments and villas. Moving forward, Sugianto says Infokost.id plans to introduce more kosts offering rooms on a daily basis rather than monthly. For those, he has introduced a direct booking feature on the site. “We want to be the Agoda for kosts,” explains Sugianto.

High-end 3D-printed jewelry just arrived on the web in Indonesia. An online store called Orori, which was first established in 2012, launched its revamped site with new 3D printing options last week in Jakarta.

Orori first started out with brick-and-mortar stores in 2003, but then made the bold move to shut down all the shops so as to focus on ecommerce. As far as Tech in Asia knows, it’s the only jewelry company in the archipelago to move from the streets to a fully online business model.

Orori founder George Budi Sumantri says the revamped site currently has more than 20,000 products (SKUs) worth more than US$35 million available for purchase. However, this does not mean Orori is holding stock of US$35 million worth of treasure – sorry, jewel thieves. In fact, it doesn’t hold inventory at all. That’s because Orori makes jewelry on demand using 3D printers.

With the help of 3D printing, Orori has incorporated a new ‘Design My Own’ feature into the site. It lets users create custom designs for their jewelry. In effect, the user-generated content also adds to the number of SKUs that Orori offers. There’s still off-the-shelf jewelry available on the estore for those who don’t want to play at being a designer.

Designing wedding rings on the go

In the Design My Own experience, users can select diamonds based on budget, shape, color, carat, cut, and clarity. In the next step, the shopper can choose the band and setting for how their gem will be mounted. They can also type out engravings and see them as they will appear on the ring. In the final review stage, users can see a 360-degree image of their order. This is meant to ensure that there are no design flaws or unwanted surprises when they receive their order a couple days later.

Sumantri says Orori has not yet released its mobile apps for iOS and Android, but for now, the site is just mobile optimized. This means that it’s accessible via mobile internet browsers, and users can perform everything on their phones that they can do on the site. This includes designing their own jewelry, says Sumantri.

Small stones equal big business

Currently, Orori sells diamonds, rings, necklaces, pendants, bracelets, earrings, and a few different types of gold bars, as well as jewelry accessories. Sumantri says the site can only take orders in Indonesia at this time, but that it will launch an English language version for Singapore in the third quarter of this year. Orori’s competitors include foreign companies like Blue Nile in the US or BlueStone in India. Blue Nile is a publicly traded company, and at this time last year BlueStone recieved a US$10 million investment led by Kalaari Capital.

McKinsey and Co says the global jewelry industry seems poised for a glittering future. Annual global sales of €148 billion (US$161 billion) are expected to grow at a healthy clip of five to six percent each year, totaling €250 billion (US$271 billion) by 2020. Consumer appetite for jewelry, which was dampened by the global recession, now appears more voracious than ever.

]]>https://www.techinasia.com/indonesia-jewelry-ecommerce-orori-3d-printing/feed/0https://www.techinasia.com/indonesia-jewelry-ecommerce-orori-3d-printing/LimeRoad, a fashion portal made by a woman for Indian women, raises $30Mhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PennOlson/~3/SCppN0qnWTs/
https://www.techinasia.com/limeroad-fashion-portal-woman-indian-women-raises-30m/#commentsMon, 30 Mar 2015 07:21:16 +0000https://www.techinasia.com/?p=239523

Suchi Mukherjee gave birth to both her second child and her startup in 2012. In fact, she was on maternity leave when she started up LimeRoad, a fashion ecommerce site targeted at Indian women. Today, it is one of the biggest success stories by a woman entrepreneur in India.

LimeRoad has just raised US$30 million from Tiger Global, Matrix Partners, and Lightspeed Venture Partners in series C funding. The same investors had pumped US$15 million into the fast-growing fashion portal less than a year ago. Earlier, at inception, Matrix and Lightspeed had invested US$5 million.

LimeRoad combines fashion ecommerce with social discovery. The site features user-generated ‘looks’ which mix and match interesting combinations of apparel and accessories. It encourages users to experiment with ‘looks’, such as a fusion of Indian and Western styles in wearing a modern crop-top with a traditional saree or finding a dupatta [light Indian women’s scarf] to go with denims and T-shirt.

A user can build collections of styles in scrapbooks on the site, which others can browse for ideas. LimeRoad’s algorithms rank the scrapbooks to make the most relevant and popular of them easier to find.

Medium of self-expression

“Women from across the country are using scrapbooks as a medium for self-expression… As a result, over 80 percent of our orders come from organic traffic,” says LimeRoad CEO and co-founder Suchi Mukherjee, in a statement on the funding.

“The uniqueness of LimeRoad lies in the passionate user base and the mission of providing an engaging platform for smaller brands to thrive,” adds Lee Fixel, Managing Partner at Tiger Global.

Suchi Mukherjee, who studied finance at the London School of Economics, worked for eBay in London before becoming an entrepreneur. Her co-founders in LimeRoad include Prashant Malik, who was earlier with Facebook, and Ankush Mehra, who headed the supply chain at Reliance Hypermarkets.

Fashion discovery is a hot space in India. Just last week, another fashion portal Roposo raised US$5 million in series A investment. This too was led by Tiger Global, along with participation from Binny Bansal, co-founder of ecommerce biggie Flipkart.

Started by three IIT Delhi alumni, Roposo is derived from ‘apropos’, alluding to its pitch on making the search for fashion products more relevant to user needs.

]]>https://www.techinasia.com/limeroad-fashion-portal-woman-indian-women-raises-30m/feed/0https://www.techinasia.com/limeroad-fashion-portal-woman-indian-women-raises-30m/With final exams on the horizon, China’s test prep startups rake in investmentshttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PennOlson/~3/CS1zRHyRZFM/
https://www.techinasia.com/test-prep-startups-china-funding/#commentsMon, 30 Mar 2015 04:13:22 +0000https://www.techinasia.com/?p=239500
China, as with many countries in Asia, relies heavily on standardized tests to determine the future paths of its students. Now, with the end of the school year in sight, those students look for any edge they can get before exam day. Standardized testing, while arguably not the most effective way to predict a student’s real-world success, has become a multibillion-dollar global industry.

Some startups in China are capitalizing on that captive market, and have announced funding just over two months ahead of the country’s infamous college entrance exam, the gaokao.

Yuan Tiku, which literally translates to "Ape Exam," just announced it completed a US$60 million series D round of funding, with a valuation of US$360 million, according to QQ Tech. CMC Capital Partners led the round, followed by New Horizon Capital, IDG Capital, and Matrix Partners China. Its US$15 million series C round came in July last year.

The app, which lets students do practice problems and assessments on their smartphones, claims to have 13 million high school students on board. The app’s algorithms can analyze a student’s strengths and weaknesses, and intelligently target him or her with questions to meet individual needs.

English test prep help

Another test prep service from China, Xiaozhan Jiaoyu, last week secured a US$29 million series B round led by GGV Capital, according to Duozhi. Xiaozhan focuses on Chinese students who want to attend school abroad. The startup aims at students taking SAT, ACT, GRE, TOEFL, and IELTS exams.

The website offers an information portal with news, forums, practice tests, and other useful materials. It also sells live tutoring/training sessions with its 600 full-time teachers, 80 percent of whom have overseas work or study experience. TOEFL prep (test of English as a foreign language) is the most popular area of study on Xiaozhan, with over 50,000 students.

Xiaozhan plans to get more involved in the education business abroad, providing a custom recommendation service for colleges and universities.

Other big names in China’s online test prep sector include YY’s 100 Wangxue, which focuses on IELTS and TOEFL English-language tests, and Baidu-backed Wanxue, which hones in on post-graduate entrance exams and civil service exams.

China’s test prep methods have come under scrutiny from critics who say they only teach students to "game the test" rather than learn in a more practical and applicable way. As a result, they say students are underprepared for college and employment.

The trend won’t end anytime soon, though. China’s use of standardized tests dates back hundreds of years to the Han Dynasty, when the imperial examination was used to select candidates for the state bureaucracy.

Here are 10 startups to watch on Techlist. Our Pro users can find additional information in Techlist, including exclusive data like revenue and traffic. Techlist is currently tracking more than 3,200 startups in Asia and adding hundreds more each week. Enjoy the list.

Short pitch: Car From Japan is a platform to trade Japanese used cars. Customers from all over the world can find and buy Japanese used cars, machinery & parts from us. We provide secure transactions and no hidden costs. Now listing more than 13,000 cars and trucks.

Short pitch: SociaBuzz is an influencer marketing platform. We connect advertisers (brands, agencies, businesses) with thousands of Twitter influencers to create buzz, awareness, interest, desire and action for their brands or businesses.

Late last week, an interesting piece ran in Bloomberg about China’s plans to eliminate foreign technology from government agencies and key industries by 2020, mostly for security reasons. China has already begun pushing in this direction – Windows 8 is banned from government computers, Qualcomm got slammed with a massive anti-trust fine, and Apple products like iPads have been removed from approved government procurement lists.

But can China really divest itself from foreign technology, at least in key areas? Not until it develops its own computer operating system. Most of China’s PC-based computing currently runs on Windows XP. Bloomberg reports that the government’s hopes for a new Chinese OS are based on NeoKylin, a so-called “homegrown” operating system that just underwent a successful test in the relatively small city of Siping. This, apparently, is China’s replacement for Windows.

To begin with, replacing one OS with another in a fairly small city is not quite the same thing as replacing the entire national computing infrastructure across government, banking, and state-owned organizations. These organizations have thousands of systems that work on Windows, and getting slow-moving SoEs (for example) to switch over to a totally new OS and rebuild all those systems is likely to take more than five years. Bureaucratic inertia is a powerful thing.

The bigger issue, though, is that NeoKylin isn’t really a homegrown OS at all. It is based on the Kylin OS that China’s government has been working on for nearly 15 years now, and Kylin has never been built from scratch. Early versions of the system were copied from an American OS called FreeBSD. Later, the government shifted to using Linux as the operating system’s base. The latest version of Kylin is based on Ubuntu and it has been developed for China by a British company called Canonical. In fact, Ubuntu Kylin is so not Chinese that as of very late 2014 parts of Kylin still hadn’t been translated into Chinese yet.

Ubuntu Kylin, China’s “homegrown” OS, was developed by a British company.

It’s not clear just how similar NeoKylin and Ubuntu Kylin are. Ubuntu Kylin is likely the newer software, as the NeoKylin name has been being used for a while. China Standard Software Company claims that it developed NeoKylin jointly with China’s National Defense Science and Technology University, with no mention of Canonical. But NeoKylin is still based on Linux, which means that at the end of the day even if it hasn’t borrowed from Canonical and Ubuntu Kylin, a lot of the operating system’s code was not developed in China. (And of course, it’s possible that the move to Kylin over the next five years will ultimately favor Ubuntu Kylin over NeoKylin anyway).

Setting aside the irony of using open-source software to close off your software systems from the world, the move from Windows to Linux does make sense from China’s perspective. Even if NeoKylin or Ubuntu Kylin or whatever Linux fork China’s government ends up using isn’t completely homegrown, it is certainly more homegrown than a wholly foreign-developed OS like Windows. And since China’s government has a hand in the development of these Linux-based operating systems, switching over to them will mean that China is no longer beholden to Microsoft to keep its operating systems up to date (which has been an issue since Microsoft ended support for China’s favorite OS, Windows XP). Kylin’s core may be foreign, but China still has much more control over it than the country ever had over Windows.

Still, the idea that China can replace all foreign technology in the next five years by switching to an operating system based on Linux – foreign-developed technology – is a little absurd. And PC operating systems won’t be the only area where China encounters issues if it wishes to entirely abandon foreign tech. China faces the same problem in the mobile space, for example, where virtually every successful Chinese-developed mobile OS is based on the foreign-developed Google Android OS.

More likely than a wholesale switch to domestically-developed tech is that China will push its foreign suppliers to submit to more thorough inspections and share more technology with their Chinese counterparts in return for being allowed to continue supplying the Middle Kingdom. And although some foreign tech firms may be loath to agree to this, many will. Making some concessions to China’s government will hurt less than abandoning one’s supply business in the country altogether. China’s isn’t ready to wholly replace foreign technology, but it doesn’t need to because the Chinese tech market is so appealing that it will increasingly be able to dictate strict terms to foreign companies wishing to do business there.

NeoKylin and Ubuntu Kylin are not wholly-Chinese-developed operating systems – this is true. But the move towards them still belies the end of an era for foreign tech firms like Microsoft, who until now have been able to release products like Windows without much need to consider the Chinese government’s security needs and requirements. In the future, any foreign company that wants to go after large and lucrative enterprise tech markets like Chinese SoEs, government departments, or Chinese banks will likely have to make major concessions, and including technological concessions that might bolster the foreign firm’s Chinese competitors.

Is that better than being banned from the market entirely? For some companies, the answer is probably “no.” So while China isn’t likely to have wholly replaced foreign tech in its important sectors by 2020, what will happen probably still isn’t good news for any foreign tech company.

]]>https://www.techinasia.com/china-eliminate-foreign-technology-2020/feed/2https://www.techinasia.com/china-eliminate-foreign-technology-2020/21 startups in Asia that caught our eyehttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PennOlson/~3/0W-8InrUOxc/
https://www.techinasia.com/asian-startup-list-29-march-2015/#commentsSun, 29 Mar 2015 10:08:01 +0000https://www.techinasia.com/?p=235912
Here’s our newest round-up of the featured startups on our site this week. If you have startup tips or story suggestions, feel free to email us. Enjoy this week’s list!

First Code Academy is Hong Kong-based coding school for kids with a slew of programs for students from Grade 2 all the way up till Grade 7 and beyond. Each class has between four to eight students, and their class fee entitles them to complementary year-long access to the academy’s online learning platform.

PurpleJamm is a no-frills website where independent artists go to sell their songs and albums. Its mission is simple: at least 50 percent of the proceeds from the sale of every song should go to humanitarian works of credible and reputable non-profit organizations. The rest is split between management and operations, and the artists.

Traintracks is a new data analytics startup based in Beijing. The tool aims to ‘reduce the complexity, constraints, and cost of behavioural analytics at scale’, and has signed on a handful of prominent clients in the first month of its invitation-only private beta, including Netease’s new North American operations, and China’s Tinder-like social network, Tantan.

Razorpay is building a platform to make it easy for small organizations in India to accept online payments in an easy, affordable, and secure manner. It just got the backing of YCombinator and a three-month stint in Silicon Valley as part of the YCombinator accelerator program.

English learning service BeNative Pro is developed by Seoul-based educational startup Smatoos. Its focus is on real-world English and learning to speak naturally. Its business English learning service is based on video clips featuring American entrepreneurs and CEOs who’ve spent years managing staff and negotiating deals. The startup just secured a series B investment from Korea Investment Partners, Mirae Asset Venture Investment, and Partners Investment.

Cupslice is a photo editing app that has filters and effects, but its main feature is funny stickers that capture current trends from social media. Users can insert these on top of their own images to add context and meaning. After editing, the photos can be shared through a variety of social networks, including Instagram, Twitter and Whatsapp.

OYO Rooms is a marketplace for branded budget hotels. Initially, it focused on Gurgaon, and in the last six months, it scaled up to 200 hotels in 10 cities across India. It’s like an Uber for hotel rooms – the customer is promised a certain level of service without much information on the owner of the property.

AspiredSteps is an app that allows users to post DIY projects accompanied by step-by-step photos and voice or video instructions for the DIY community to follow. User can also sell the items that they have crafted. In addition, makers can also add the project’s required materials, which can then be purchased directly on the app, saving DIY enthusiasts valuable time shopping around for a project’s exact materials.

India-based specialist ecommerce store Teabox sells its own-brand premium tea, and has complete control over the customer experience – it partners with 200 tea growers across India and neighboring Nepal so that it can ensure quality and volume, and then gets the tea vacuum-packed and shipped out in about a week after it’s plucked from the bushes. The company just secured US$6 million in series A funding.

FinlTop is a startup that brings big expensive medical devices from the hospital to your pocket. Rather than attaching electrodes to arms, legs, or chest, the company requires the user to simply press their thumbs to the two metal sensors on the smartphone-sized device. A readout appears in real-time and the results are sent to the user’s smartphone, which can in turn be sent to his or her doctor.

Fxkart is an online aggregator of foreign exchange dealers based in the UAE and India. It aims to help consumers get the best deal on forex transactions, while helping dealers get visibility and more transactions. It also uses a reverse auction model to drive down rates, while offering the convenience of finding suitable dealers nearby.

Healint, a Singapore startup with a mobile app promising to predict migraines with an accuracy of 90 percent, has raised over US$1 million in seed funding from Wavemaker Pacific, Gree Ventures, and Shin Ryoku. The app uses passive sensor readings from mobile phones, external data sources, and user input to help patients better understand their condition.

Wheel Line is an on-demand courier and transportation company that utilizes motorcycle taxis, or “o-jeks” as they’re called in the archipelago. Currently, Wheel Line does not have a mobile app and it simply takes orders via email and telephone.

Beacon is a crowdfunding and crowd sales platform that – at least for the moment – accepts donations only in the form of Bitcoin. Signing up and listing a project will take only a few minutes, and the fees are negligible. Whether your fund is successful or not, you’ll be required to pay a 0.0001 BTC (US$0.03) transaction fee.

Bangalore-based Furlenco lets you rent furniture, also get a complete home furnishing solution on a monthly rental of US$100. When you get tired of something – just ask Furlenco to take it away, and get a new writing table or even a complete new look for your home.

Travelio lets consumers negotiate the price of the hotels they wish to book in Indonesia. According to the co-founders, the site has already collected 5,000 participating hotels in Asia after one and a half months of pre-launch traction efforts. Travelio’s hotels are spread out across Asia Pacific, present in countries including Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Macau, Hong Kong, Japan, and South Korea.

We’re now gearing up for our 9th edition, Tech in Asia Singapore 2015, to be held this coming 6 and 7 May. For the first time ever at the conference, we will be featuring about 250 startups at the Bootstrap Alley on both days, and startup founders are able to exhibit for free!

Furthermore, we will be having a 10-city search in Asia this coming March, for the best startups to showcase at Tech in Asia Singapore. Winners of each city’s pitch will stand a chance to get free flights and accommodation, startup passes, booths to Startup Asia Singapore, and priority consideration to be one of the 10 finalists at the Arena finale during the conference itself!

As entrepreneurs, we make bold claims to change the status quo with our products. We raise money and build a small team to make our vision a reality. The lucky ones last for a few years, serve millions of users, and eventually taste what many in the tech ecosystem deem as success: an exit.

Mr Lee Kuan Yew did not have the luxury of an ecosystem because there was none. He created one for all of us though. He made it easy for almost anyone to do business in the country, made investors feel secure, and introduced policies to ensure Singaporeans are bilingual so we can have the best of both worlds. These are the few of the many things he has done for us Singaporeans.

Having run Tech in Asia for over four years, I constantly think about the happiness of all my 70 team members. I see them as my own children. It is my job to see everyone succeed and be happy at their roles. Just thinking for 70 team members has caused me many sleepless nights. Imagine thinking for the entire Singapore population. It must be extremely intense and stressful.

There was no reason for Singapore to succeed. We had a tiny population and a clear lack of resources. Heck, even Mr Lee, similar to many entrepreneurs building their startups out there, wasn’t a proven leader. If venture capitalists were to look at Singapore as a startup, I can imagine them saying, “Meh, small market size, unproven team. Pass.”

But Mr Lee did not back down. He bootstrapped and made Singapore a success. It’s a miracle.

There is no “exit” for Singapore either. Mr. Lee just kept building for the last 50 years to achieve progress for all Singaporeans. If that’s not commitment, I don’t know what is. It’s rare to find founders who stay on and commit their life to one single project. Mr Lee’s unwavering determination and commitment is worth learning from.

Surely, not everyone agrees with his decision and actions. But please be reminded that all leaders face the same problems. You can’t please everyone. Even in a 70 people team, I can’t claim to make decisions that will make everyone happy. That’s the brutal fact and only time will tell if decisions made were right or wrong. For Singapore to be where it is today, it is crystal clear to me that our country leaders have consistently made solid decisions and executed well for their people. As a citizen, I have no complaints and I’m proud to be a Singaporean.

Sinoze is most well known for mobile music game Thapster, which features Thai and international artists and has, it claims, about a million monthly active users.

Today the company announced it has raised a US$750,000 round from InVent, the venture capitalist arm of Thailand’s largest telco Intouch. The funding will go towards international expansion through its second title Electhap, a music game aimed at the international market.

This is the second Thai games studio InVent has backed in recent months. It put US$500,000 into Infinity Levels in December 2014. InVent was started in 2012 and has in its portfolio Thai startups like ebookstore Ookbee, software company Computerlogy, and healthtech startup Meditech.

It has backed five startups so far in its existence, with two to three more in the pipeline. It doesn’t focus on any specific industry, but invests in companies that can add value to the Intouch group.

The firm’s justification for the move is that the skill set of some employees no longer matches the company’s needs. When it made the decision to switch from browser games to native games, Gumi hired new staff with the appropriate skill set while also creating numerous training programs for current staff to learn new development methods. Now, with the transition to native games essentially complete, and the company’s bottom line still suffering, it has created an opportunity for staff whose skill development is lagging to find new work. The restructuring is scheduled to take effect on April 30.

Unfortunately for Gumi, the IPO honeymoon was short lived. Just three weeks ago, the company was forced to revise an anticipated US$10.6M profit to a US$5M loss for the fiscal year. It blamed weak overseas revenue on Japanese smash hit Brave Frontier, missed schedules for international versions of other games, and poor overall growth in foreign markets.

Gumi founder and CEO Hironao Kunimitsu has promised to address the firm’s woes by speeding up development of more than a dozen native games, strengthening overseas publishing operations, and taking a personal six-month pay cut.

As one of Japan’s mobile gaming giants flounders, another is poised for a boom. Competing publisher DeNA earlier this month inked a deal with Nintendo to bring Mario and company to smart devices for the first time. Gumi has alliances with once prominent Nintendo rival Sega and blockbuster chat app Line.